Three 90-minutes parallel ENGAGE Workshops took recently place at the context of the Samos Summit 2012 event, on 3 July 2012.
ENGAGE WS I : Open Data Requirements
During the first, titled “WS I : Open Data Requirements”, Anneke Zuiderwijk – Van Eijk (Delft University of Technology), Charalampos Alexopoulos (University of AEGEAN) and Marijn Janssen (Delft University of Technology) exchanged knowledge and ideas with the audience about the status of open data, its benefits and challenges and user requirements.
Participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire about requirements of open data users and to write down on post-itsthe three requirements of open data users that are most important according to them. Then, all post-its were gathered, discussed with the participants, and organized in categories, such as functional and non-functional requirements. Finally, the organizers of the workshop presented the interim results of the questionnaire and put forward several propositions, which provided the basis for an interactive discussion among all participants. The requirements that were derived during the workshop will be used to further specify the e-infrastructure for open data that is being developed in the ENGAGE project.
ENGAGE WS II: The ENGAGE Open Data Prototype
At the second, titled “WS II: The ENGAGE Open Data Prototype” the ENGAGE first release of the platform prototype has been demonstrated by Spyros Mouzakitis and Harry Tsavdaris of NTUA.
The workshop was conducted in order to gather feedback from potential users and discover the priorities for ENGAGE. Initially, a live demonstration of the current prototype was performed, followed by a visual presentation of the plans for the next release. The 20 attendees were then asked to fill in a questionnaire and use an online feedback tool where they could comment freely and suggest new ideas for the ENGAGE Services infrastructure. Based on their input, support for the data curation process and the implementation of collaboration utilities were marked as the most important, and most commented, features for the next release. Furthermore, users provided ideas for the enhancement of data visualization tools, as well as on improvements for searching and filtering datasets.
ENGAGE WS III: New visions and ideas for Open Data and Governance
The third workshop titled “WS III: New visions and ideas for Open Data and Governance” was animated by Elias Kalapanidas and Yannis Charalambidis started with the presentation of Nigel Shadbolt of the University of Southampton under the same title. This served as a nice provocation for the next session, where each participant identified the 3 most promising ideas for open data and governance. The consolidated results were clustered in 3 categories: Privacy and Trust, Technology, Business, and are presented below.
Privacy and Trust
- Truly free licensing of open data
- A new IP rights management framework for open data. Who is the “owner” of open data should be clear (liability to maintain data)
- Anonymisation methods needed
- Restriction of data combination (for data where individual identity can be “derived”)
- Privacy should be extended to Internet of Things (e.g. data sent by your car)
- Harmonisation of legal frameworks (pan-European)
Technology
- Multilingual metadata & UI for open data access (do not forget language technologies, publication)
- Take into account existing ontologies in scientific communities
- Real-time streaming of data (IoT, WoT)
- Machine understandable meta-knowledge made by non-experts
- A single access API for all open data
- Simple open standards for datasets (for complex documents, charts, etc)
- Better metadata for discovery AND processing
- Quality of open data: history, provenance
Business
- Budget constraints for open data (barrier)
- Policy for creating open data demand by citizens and scientists
- Blend open data and innovation. Make new apps for (smart) cities, crossborder apps, etc.
- Create value for policy makers (though apps based on open data)
- Think of ENGAGE USP’s in view of existing national open data portals
- Find and make the killer apps
- Make a “full open data” experiment ?
- Include Enterprises as open data providers (new direction)
- Make money out of open data – business models (e.g. who is the owner?: for PSI, us. For Private SI: the enterprises)
The results of the 3 workshops are driving forth the next release of the ENGAGE open data infrastructure that will be published early in 2013. Until then, please stay tuned.